Trouble in Toontown

Keanu Reeves looks up from a single blue flower and stares into the camera with an expression of pained revelation. As he gazes off into the distance, the camera pulls back to reveal rows of cornstalks surrounding him, spreading across a valley bordered by the hazy mountains of Southern California. The scene is the emotional climax of Richard Linklater's new film, A Scanner Darkly. It's a simple sequence, a cinematic trope that most third-year film students could pull off with a dolly and a decent lighting setup. But Linklater, a veteran director whose successes include School of Rock, Slacker, and Dazed and Confused, has been laboring over these 30 seconds for several months.

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You can't really blame him. Link�later's not working with a real flower or real mountains or even the real Keanu Reeves. He's trying to coax a performance out of an animated version of the actor drawn into a landscape that is completely digital – and the system is not cooperating. It can't seem to handle the transition from individual flower petals and cornstalks to a mass of multicolor vegetation. There is a slight but undeniable flicker.

"We really didn't know what we were getting ourselves into with this one," Link�later says, taking a break from production at his studio in Austin and flopping into a worn leather chair. The downbeat vibe in the room is captured by a promotional poster for Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film, Straw Dogs, that hangs outside his office: A young Dustin Hoffman sports a pair of shattered glasses and a weary expression. "I know how to make a movie," Linklater says, "but I don't really know how to handle the animation."

This is a good time to learn. More and more Hollywood movies rely on animation, which is creating opportunities (and problems) for a growing number of directors. Sure, Chicken Little and Curious George are animated. But so are major sequences in live-action blockbusters like King Kong and the upcoming Superman Returns.

For all its popularity, though, animation remains the province of specialists. Only the most tech-savvy filmmakers, like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez, do animation work in-house. To transform an entire film into animation, as Linklater is doing with Scanner, is a massive tech�nical challenge.

Linklater first entered the geek world of animators five years ago when he made the film Waking Life. For Scanner, he's employing the same animation technique he used then. It's a process known as rotoscoping: Artists digitally trace over some frames of live-action footage by hand with a Wacom pen and tablet. Custom software fills in the rest. But Waking Life, a wispy collection of vignettes defined by its lack of visual uniformity, was a less ambitious production. It was a mild success – it generated $3 million (twice its cost) at the box office and found a loyal audience in the DVD aftermarket – but Linklater was disappointed with the movie's impact. Scanner is a dramatic narrative with a consistent look, starring seasoned actors like Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., and Woody Harrelson. And then there's the complicated rotoscoping software, Rotoshop. Originally developed for Waking Life by MIT grad Bob Sabiston, the program was updated for Scanner: It has a few hundred thousand lines of new code and a couple of dozen new commands. It's proprietary and few people know how to use it.

So why would the indie icon choose to work in animation again? Just as the painterly, pop-art look of rotoscoping perfectly depicted the dreamlike world in Waking Life, there was no better way, Linklater felt, to capture the trippy reality described by science fiction author Philip K. Dick in his 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly. Set in the near future, the tale follows an undercover detective named Fred (Reeves) as he spies on a drug ring. During his investigation, Fred becomes addicted to Substance D and develops a split personality.

Linklater also sees an opportunity with Scanner to bring full-length animated movies to a broader, older audience. Outside of a few proven television properties like Beavis and Butthead and South Park, no successful animation for adults has been released in the US since the 1981 fantasy epic Heavy Metal. "There is kind of an animation ghetto that exists in the industry," he says. "From the beginning, we lived with the Hollywood truism that adults don't see animated movies. But I have always had the response that, yeah, adults don't go see animated movies until they do! All it takes is one movie."

Making that movie is the tricky part. Every film has its troubles: busted �budgets, schedule snafus, problems with the crew. But Linklater also faced new challenges exclusive to animation – challenges that are becoming familiar to the rest of Hollywood.

The project started smoothly enough. Casting a movie can often be difficult. Where will a star's name be placed on the credits (above the director's or below)? How will his image appear on the promo posters? And, most contentious, at what point will an actor begin to earn royalties? But not this time. Linklater had a powerful selling point. Because Scanner was being rotoscoped, there would be no early morning makeup sessions (no makeup sessions at all, in fact), no tedious costume changes, and no endless retakes. The sets would be digitally created while the film was being animated in postproduction – making the filming environment more like a theater than a movie set. Plus, there was Philip K. Dick, who's always a draw in Hollywood. Reeves, an avid reader of his stories, immediately signed on. Ryder had a connection to Dick – her godfather, Timothy Leary, was an acquaintance of the late writer. Both celebrities agreed to work at the Screen Actors Guild scale rate, which for Scanner came to about $72,000, plus a portion of any backend profits – an extremely unusual arrangement for top-tier actors. Reeves, for example, pulled in more than $15 million and 15 percent of the gross for each of the Matrix sequels.

With a budget of just $6.7 million, the film started shooting in Austin in May 2004 and wrapped in just six weeks. "It was a socialist endeavor of sorts," says Reeves' manager, Erwin Stoff. "We all gathered at the Four Seasons and rehearsed, shot, and worked on the script. There were no image issues. It was all about being true to the characters, which is a rare thing to have." The summer camp atmosphere also fostered an easy chemistry between Downey and Harrelson, whose onscreen improvisations the director preserved in the final cut.

But things began to go sour after the edited movie was sent for rotoscoping. Linklater again tapped Sabiston to head the effort; together with producer Tommy Pallotta, they established the methods that would be used to animate the movie in time for a September 2005 release.

Most of the animators were hired locally in Austin. Sabiston signed a glassblower and a photo lab technician, a comic book illustrator and a sculptor. Only a few of the original 30 or so animators had moviemaking experience. "I told them, you are making a living as an animator, that's the good news. The bad news is that it's hard work," Linklater says. "It was more of a factory and less artists expressing themselves."

That message apparently did not sink in. Roughly six weeks into animation, with Sabiston in charge and Linklater off shooting The Bad News Bears, only a few animated segments were in the can. It took weeks just to get a single body part drawn for one sequence. Sabiston had divvied up the work among five teams, with a leader for each. But communication was poor between the groups, and the uniform animation style Linklater wanted gave way to freestyle drawing. When Linklater saw one rendition of Reeves' beard, he complained to the lead animator that it reminded him of Fred Flintstone.

Linklater began to fear that his vision of the film might never get translated into animation. He knew how to capture the story with a camera, but with a digital pen it was infinitely harder. This became most apparent in scenes involving the so-called scramble suit. Dick describes it as a shape-shifting body glove able to produce "a million and a half physiognomic fraction-�representations of various people every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure projected at any nanosecond and then switched to the next." The idea is that the wearer becomes a "vague blur," making the suit a perfect way for detectives to hide their identities. Link�later wanted the movie version of the suit to be clearer and asked that the faces be visible as they changed, keeping the identity of the person underneath concealed. About a dozen members of the 50-person animation team were assigned to the task. But after almost two months, some were still learning the software. Linklater was frustrated. It's hard enough for a live-action director to mediate his vision through collectives of professional animators. It's nearly impossible when most are artists plucked off the street with no experience using the tools.

Mark Gill, head of Warner Independent Pictures, the film's distributor, was getting nervous. When he asked for a status report in late November 2004, there were no finished sequences and no easy way to determine what percentage of the film was complete. The entire film was being animated at once, rather than from beginning to end. Rumors circulated that Gill was moving the production to Los Angeles, where it could be monitored more closely. Fearing for their jobs, some animators logged 18-hour days for two weeks to produce a trailer to run with another Reeves film, Constantine. The trailer appeased both Linklater and Gill. Hope returned to the set.

But behind closed doors, it was clear something had to change. Sabiston, who was falling behind schedule, allegedly asked for more time, more money, and more staff. Tensions mounted, and one Friday in February 2005, four months after the animation process began, Sabiston and his four-person core team went to a local caf� to discuss strategy. Pallotta took action. A security guard was posted at the door, the locks were changed, and their workstations were seized. Pallotta replaced Sabiston with two local artists, Jason Archer and Paul Beck, whom he felt would bring a more practical, commercial attitude to the production. "There were a lot of comments about 'ruining the art,'" says a source close to the situation. "But we weren't trying to ruin it, we just wanted it better than they wanted it done." The studio bumped the budget to $8.7�million and gave Linklater another six months to finish the movie.

Pallotta recast the operation as a more traditional, Disney�esque animation project – complete with a style manual, a strict deadline schedule, and a policy of breaking the film into even smaller segments. For example, one animator was assigned to work primarily on Winona Ryder's character. The thinking was that the character would then look the same throughout the entire film. The style manual standardized the movie's visuals and indoctrinated the new artists. It dictated a drawing method for everything from male characters ("an emphasis on tendons in the neck adds masculinity") to Reeves' beard ("retain the patchy quality by inking large, separate chunks that can be unified by color"). This approach, used successfully by larger animation houses, eliminates the personal interpretation that can sabotage a director's unified vision.

The animation process dragged out for 15 months. During much of that time, Linklater stayed away from the Austin production. He emailed and phoned from Los Angeles as he filmed The Bad News Bears and, upon returning to Texas, started an adaptation of the best-selling exposé Fast Food Nation. He was busy, but mostly he kept his distance because the operation was too painful for him to watch. "I go crazy because it feels like the animation process just goes so slow," Linklater said in December, a few weeks before he was scheduled to deliver the completed film to the studio. "I would look over the shoulder of an animator one week and then look a week later, and it felt like very little had gone on. So just to keep myself sane I like to work on other things."

By December 2005, with a live screening scheduled for that month, Linklater had no choice but to focus on Scanner's final details. The initial online reviews of the screening were mostly good, though one viewer commented that the animation looked like "a retarded monkey tracing with his gnarled feet onto wiggly parchment." Linklater knew the closing scene still needed work. The transition from the close-up of Reeves to the distant mountains had a natural feel on film but suffered in animation – the software appeared unable to fill in the soft edges. The app might have been tweaked to handle the transition better, but Sabiston was gone. So Linklater relied on an old-school film editing technique. He cut the scene at the most jarring inflection point and blended the two ends with a cinematic dissolve. It was a trick, to be sure, but with the project woefully behind schedule, it was a compromise that had to work.

When Linklater first began this project, the September 2005 release date the studio set seemed tight, but doable. It gave them a year to animate. But as the artists made last-minute adjustments to Downey's expressions, Linklater worried that they wouldn't even be ready for a revised release date of March 31, 2006. On January 9, Mark Gill announced that there just wasn't enough time to properly flog the picture. "There's a million pieces that come from a finished film that you need for advertising," Gill says. "Quite frankly, we were running up against too tight a deadline." The ideal marketing schedule allows three to five months to plan public screenings, develop Web and print campaigns, and run the trailer. Gill adds that the animation technique was a big factor in the decision. "This is all new to me," he admits. "It's animation with first-of-its-kind technology, and there are challenges that come with that." A new release date of July 7 was set, putting the film up against more traditional animated fare like DreamWorks' Over the Hedge and Pixar's Cars, as well as tent-pole action movies like X3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. "Our hope is that we will be the first smart movie of the summer," Gill says.

Linklater hopes Scanner will be the first of a new wave of animated feature films made specifically for adults. "You've got a lot of very talented people working on this stuff, but at the end of the day they know they are working on a kids' film. I'm sure they would love to see that effort go toward a more traditional audience." It's already happening. Director Robert Zemeckis is using the performance-�capture animation technique he experimented with in The Polar Express to create Beowulf, due out next year. All this suggests animation is becoming a tool – like greenscreens and digital effects – and not a stand-alone genre. It's just a method of telling stories in a different way.

Linklater is a believer, but he's a tired one. "I wouldn't want to do another �animated movie," he says. "Avoid the torture." All of his foreseeable projects are live-action. Still, he adds, "I think we could find a way to do it again, without the pain."

Robert La Franco (robertlafranco@mac.com) wrote about DreamWorks in issue 13.06.